Endless summer camp

Ah, a weekend at camp.

"We lay out a Bloody Mary bar Sunday mornings," says Tereasa Surratt. "Ibuprofen and aspirin. That's the first place people go."

Surratt and her husband, David Hernandez, own Camp Wandawega, a 25-acre retreat about 15 miles north of Lake Geneva, Wis. They bought it five years ago when it was decades removed from its glory days as Wandawega Lake Resort. Since then they have rehabilitated the tired camp into a playground where they entertain family and friends with things like the Wandawega Fish Fry, Kids Weekends and last weekend's Band Camp, co-hosted by friends from Chicago's Earhole Studios.

What prompted Tereasa, 35, and David, 41, to buy the resort was its history. Not its history as a speakeasy or as a house of ill repute -- cool as that stuff is -- but David's history. He was a regular at Wandawega back in the late '60s and '70s, when it was owned by the Latvian Marian Fathers and where members of Chicago's Latvian community would gather.

"They would have a ball up here," said Herb Hernandez, David's father. "The families would come up, and friends. Sometimes there must have been 20, 30 kids."

Recalls his mother, Anna, "In the summer we'd probably come every weekend, and in August we'd have camp. The women and kids would come up for two weeks."

Those memories made Wandawega special for David. So much so that as hard times befell it, he asked the priest in charge -- Rev. Boleslavs Baginskis -- to call him if he ever thought about selling it. Someone eventually did approach "Father B" about purchasing the property, and the priest contacted David, who was able to buy it (he declines to say for how much).

"I would have been heartbroken if someone else got it," said David, founder of the digital design studio The Royal Order and a senior partner/executive creative director for the advertising, marketing and public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather, where Tereasa is also a creative director.

"Some developer probably would have come in, knocked down the buildings, divided it into lots and put up some cookie-cutter buildings."

He and Tereasa went in the opposite direction. They have spent five years restoring the camp -- its lodge, hotel and a couple of cabins -- to as it was in the '40s and '50s. "These two people have done more to fix this place up in four years than anyone else in 45 years," said William "Pat" Lano, who has been coming to Wandawega for nearly a half-century and was the caretaker for seven years before David and Tereasa bought the property.

With a small army of dedicated friends, they've cleared a forest of vegetation, rebuilt piers, brought in tons of sand to reclaim a beach, uncovered and restored a long-forgotten shuffleboard court, put on roofs, installed furnaces, painted and scraped, dug trenches. For starters.

"When they bought it, I spent maybe six months turning it inside out," said Brittany Reeves, Tereasa's former roommate who now lives in Charlotte, N.C., and who flew in for Band Camp weekend. "We were getting down and dirty, ripping up floors, painting, everything."

The plan was to get Wandawega fixed up so David and Tereasa could get married there (which they did in August 2004). It was a monumental task.

Like Reeves, William Sherman, another friend from Chicago, was in on the restoration pretty much from Day One. He remembers.

"The first time we walked through with them -- this is the 'before' -- they sat me down and I said, 'Tereasa, what are you thinking? You're nuts.'"

She was not to be deterred.

"You know who your friends are when they're willing to dig a ditch with you for six hours," said the woman whose to-do lists are legendary and who had a chainsaw on her bridal registry.

Inside the main lodge and the hotel, rooms were cleared of debris and filled with vintage furniture and artifacts. Many of the items were collected at flea markets (Tereasa set a $200 budget for each room) or, like the piano in the main building, snagged from along a curb before the trash truck arrived.

Their work also yielded some surprises. A portion of a wall was taken down to reveal a large collection of like-new Fiestaware. They found a photo that showed the barkcloth that had been stashed away was, in a previous life, used to cover chairs in the resort's dining room. Two trap doors were tied to Wandawega's bootlegging days.

The jewel of their efforts may be a 12-foot-square cabin that sits in the middle of the camp. Originally a roadside motor lodge, it had sat on Tereasa's grandmother's property in Beardstown, Ill., near Springfield. Forgotten for decades and near collapse, it was trucked to Wisconsin and beautifully restored.